Digital BW, The Print

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "Martin Wesley"
<mwesley250@e...> wrote:

> Tim, Jon,
> 
> Thanks for the very interesting information. It will be incredibly ironic,
> after the negative reception of inkjet prints by the collectors and
> publications such as Lens Works and B&W, if carbon pigment inkjet prints
> turn out to be more stable than silver fiber.
> 
> I always thought that the gelatin would be the weak link in silver printing
> since it is an organic substance produced from meat processing by products.
> Isn't it even less stable than the paper? I know it is very hydroscopic and
> gas permeable. Of course I suspect most quality inkjet papers are size with
> gelatin so we may be in the same boat.<G>
> 
> I wonder ultimately if storage and display conditions are not more critical
> than the medium chosen. (I vividly recall a 12" tall stack of boxed silver
> fiber prints the termites got to. They ate everything. Paper, gelatin and
> silver without discrimination! Looked like a Swiss cheese.) All in all,
> photography is art on paper and expectations of centuries-long print life
> seem more than a bit ridiculous.

Martin,

It is going to require a paradigm (finally got to use that word!) shift for
digital printmakers to re-adopt the standards of the 60s & 70s, when being
archival was essentially more important than having great light stability
(longevity).

Today's digital imagemaker is obsessed with how long a digital print will
last. Yet the whole concept of lasting is cloaked in an artificial
perception that having a highly rated ink and paper combination is somehow
going to guarantee the works outcome. The testers are really not taking into
consideration anything other than the effect of light on the colorants. Some
of these tests must be obvious to the testers when the paper has failed. But
the results are for ink predictions only, and not the total package.

We have seen a lot of the longevity ratings heavily modified over such short
term conditions as local ozone affecting a substrate. Out-gassing is another
key word which recently came to public attention. These are substrate
issues.

I think that we are all doing the right things in trying to make the best
inks, and use the best inks. But there is a great deal more that needs to be
pushed about the substrates we use, and how we store them, mount them, and
frame them. I understand that the top testing facilities are trying to
create criteria for predicting paper failures. Lets hope that that falls
into place and they push that to their front burners.

In regards to your comments about digital archiving. At Cone Editions, we
have had to archive a number of older computers, software, and removable
media drives because our digital archives go back all the way to 1985. Many
of the drives which we began to archive our print clients images are now
antiquated, and require drivers which only run on 030 Mac processors like
found in the Quadra 950. It can take us a day just to smooth out an old
Quadra with its operating system and SCSI cables. I am not so certain I
remember them running well when they were new. But we have tons of old image
archive libraries on Bernoulli disks and Tahiti magneto-opticals and the
like. Our recent stuff is on CD_ROM and tape. I have hope for the CD-ROM to
stick around but we have already been through 4 generations of tape drives.
Some are not backwards compatible.

It is inevitable that even a museum's digital archives will also face
obsolescence and will be hopelessly expensive to reconvert every decade or
even every few years at the rapid rate which the industry obsoletes file
formats, media and software. How could a museum possibly backup a complete
digital archive, let alone update it to a new file format? It is mind
boggling, yet much science-fiction tells a future in which deep layers of
digitized knowledge form like decaying leaves and branches and trees do in
wilderness forests over the years. What we may one day be archiving in
public and private storage systems will be accessible in the future, but on
layer upon layer of abandoned file structures and protocols of which only a
few oldies will remember how to access. Digital archeologists?

With a picture like that, it definitely improves the prospects of paper and
carbon not becoming misplaced or indecipherable. Hopefully, if we do good
work at least a few of our outputs will make it into museum storage boxes.
One could not ask for more than that.

Perhaps the answer to longevity is making really good photographs?


Jon Cone 
Piezography inks and software

I often wonder if our counterparts 100 years back
spent as much time going back and forth about how long
their prints would last?  

I imagine them, hopping from left foot to right,
eagerly running to the window every time they heard
the mail horse clop up to the door.  Oh, what is the
news of lenny's recent test of brown egg albumen
compared to that of carl's more daring gelatin size?

God bless the internet.

Anyway, as photography is the bastard child of the
arts - imagine where that puts us, the users of
photography's bastard child, inkjet printing. 
Longevity be damned - just create and show great work.

Don



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> It is going to require a paradigm (finally got to use that word!)
> shift for
> digital printmakers to re-adopt the standards of the 60s & 70s, when being
> archival was essentially more important than having great light stability
> (longevity).

Of course, it should (?) go without saying that you are most likely going to
give your prints - inkjet or silver - a good chance of surviving longer if
they are stored in as close to standard archival conditions as you can get -
dark storage, constant moderate temperature and humidity, (with no or low
cycling of the former), acid free folders, away from inks and labels etc.

You can get good basic information on this, probably some online I think,
from the Canadian Conservation Institute, RIT, George Eastman House etc.

tim

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Jon Cone
<piezobw@c...> wrote:

snip...

> Perhaps the answer to longevity is making really good photographs?

no, please, anything but that <G>.
Tyler